Mitchell (London: Mer lin, 1962), 23.

Though I am indebted to Lukács for this

discussion of the intellectual consequences of the French Revolution, the far larger
debt that the current work owes to The Historical Novel will gradually become evident.
Definitions / 7

traditions of 1789 would seem to be virtually unassailable; and so

they are on the levels of economic or, to a lesser degree, political
production. And yet (in a case of “uneven development” whose
significance Habermas has been al most alone among current
thinkers in estimating) the matter falls out rather differently on the
ideological or cultural plane, where modernity as a concept (or, in
Raymond Williams’s sense, as a structure of feeling) has never
attained complete security. Indeed, the contemporary cultural
landscape is littered with antimodern protests and in particular with
instances of ideological resis tance to natural science and to the
politics of 1789. Consider, on one educa tional level, the persistent
campaigns against evolutionary biology in the pub lic school
curriculum, or, on a somewhat different educational level, the
journalistic acclaim often granted to any treatment of the French
Revolution that recycles neo-Burkean platitudes (for example, Simon
Schama’s Citizens [1989]). Such attacks are generally made from
the political right, as these ex amples suggest, though more complex
variations on the antimodern thesis have sometimes been attempted
from the left (by far the most powerful such attempt being
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], which
identifies Auschwitz as the culminating and paradigmatic project of
en lightened modernity). There would seem, then, to be something in
the very nature of modernity with which the modern world is never
completely com fortable, and which can hardly be satisfactorily
explained as mere regressive nostalgia (as though the actual
restoration of a Catholic feudal past were an even apparently viable
option).
The “something” in question may, at least to a considerable
degree, be identified with critique, or critical theory, itself. Inseparable
from the founda tion of modernity, critical theory can nonetheless
expect no dependable grati tude from it; for the critical refusal of all
repose must call into question the structures of “actually existing”
modernity itself—and this is equally true whether one is thinking of
structures in the economic sense (the capitalist mode of production)
or in the psychological sense (the unified bourgeois ego).
Accordingly, the persistence of precritical thinking cannot be
understood as mere atavism, nor as ineffectual error to be remedied
by a course of reading in Kant, Hegel, and their successors, nor
even, exclusively, as expressing a fully serious wish for prescientific
modes of knowledge and predemocratic political organization.
Precritical thought is rather the “intellectual equivalent” (to in vert
Plekhanov’s famous formulation of the “social equivalent” of the work
of art) of any status quo. It is a nonirritable condition of mental ease
to which every mind is highly susceptible, and the inevitable Other
with which critique must dialogically contend in any arena however
modern. (The real force of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as of
the celebrated opening essay “Cultu ral Criticism and Society” in
Adorno’s Prisms [1955], depends on understand ing that the
Frankfurt School critique of modernity—crucially a critique of critique
—is thus also an implacable self-critique and in that sense
thoroughly
8 Critical Theory and Science Fiction /

modern after all.) Critical theory, to use a currently fashionable term,

is un swervingly oppositional.9
The various definitional strands suggested thus far may now be
 woven, at least provisionally, into a more extensive definition of
critical theory. Critical theory is dialectical thought: that is, thought
which (in principle) can take nothing less than the totality of the
human world or social field for its object. And yet, not only does
critical theory regard the latter as a historical process, constantly in
material flux; it also conceptualizes its own methodology as deeply
involved in that flux rather than as a passive intellectual instrument
by means of which an unproblematic (as-if-Cartesian) subject
extracts absolute knowledge from pregiven objects. Furthermore, by
dissolving the reified static categories of the ideological status quo,
critical theory constantly shows that things are not what they seem to
be and that things need not eternally be as they are. Thus it
maintains a cutting edge of social subversion even at its most
rarefied and abstract.
It is not my present purpose to suggest an inventory of those
theories since Kant and Hegel that can be regarded as genuinely
critical. Such discrimina tions will be made ad hoc throughout the
current study, but a full-scale cata logue would be far too
cumbersome (even leaving aside the difficulties of un dialectical
genre theory—to be discussed in the following section of this chapter
—that a merely classificatory approach would entail: critical and pre
critical elements may well coexist even within the same text, to say
nothing of the same “school”). Nonetheless, I do want to discuss
briefly three areas of theoretical discourse that seem to me
privileged.10
Marxism remains the central instance of post-Hegelian critical
thought. I admit at once, however, that Marxism is undergoing a
certain crisis today, though not precisely in any of the ways that it is
currently fashionable to main tain. For example, the neoliberal notion
that the totalizing intellectual dy namic of Marxism is somehow
obsolete can hardly be taken seriously save as a symptom of how
the increasingly pervasive regime of commodification and exchange-
value makes it increasingly difficult to resist the empiricist splinter ing
of knowledge into monographic “specialities.” Indeed, the ever more
thorough penetration of the social field by exchange-value is itself a
function of the progressive globalization of capital, which in turn
renders a perspective ca pable of grasping social formations as
totalities more urgent, though doubtless
9. Cf. Horkheimer in the founding text of the Frankfurt usage, “Traditional and Critical The ory”: “The hostility to theory
as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with
critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theo rists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification by means
of categories which are as neu tral as possible, that is, categories which are indispensable to inherited ways of life”;
Horkheimer, Criti